Do you suffer from Dogbert’s anxiety? Do you feel that, if all your actions are shown to be the predictable outcomes of brain chemistry, then you’ll be missing something deeply important?
I don’t, and that’s because I’m a compatibilist. Compatibilism is a school of thought that runs from Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century (and some would say even Aristotle) to Daniel Dennett in our own time. We compatibilists have a robust concept of free will, which is not threatened by biology, or chemistry, or physics, no matter how Dilbertishly deterministic any of them turn out to be. Our philosophy is science-friendly and free-will-friendly at the same time.
In this post I’ll show you how to be a compatibilist Continue reading